Local telephone service providers, through a central office, offer a variety of optional services to their customers. Some of these services provide information about a person placing a call (a calling party) to a person receiving the call (a called party).
In order to provide these services, the central office ordinarily has access to a local database which has telephone-number fields correlated with data fields containing information such as the calling party's name. Prior to terminating a call to the called party, the central office searches the database for the telephone number of the calling party. If the telephone number is found within the database, the central office accesses the relevant information and delivers it to the called party.
Customer premises equipment (CPE) of many offices and homes integrates telephony and computers. This type of CPE connects to a network environment that includes both a real or virtual telephone path and a real or virtual data path for access to a computer network, such as the Internet.
There is an emerging technology that integrates both a computer and a telephone into a single device. One example of this is a smart or intelligent phone 100 (see FIG. 1), a phone which contains a built-in microprocessor that is capable of running applications such as Web browsing software. Another example is Internet television with integrated telephony.
There is a need to provide a caller identification service that takes advantage of CPE that integrates telephony and computers.